Chocolate Granola Bars

Ingredients
2 cups rolled oats (6.65oz / 190g)
1/2 cup packed brown sugar (6.4oz / 180g)
1/2 cup wheat germ (2.25oz / 65g)
1 cup whole wheat flour (5.1oz / 145g)
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup honey
1 egg, beaten
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3/4 cup mini chocolate chips (4oz / 120g)
3/4 cup chopped nuts (3oz / 82g) – I prefer toasted pecans
*1/2 cup dried fruit (varies) – optional, reduce chips and nuts to 1/2 cup each if using

Instructions
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Line a 9×13 inch pan two pieces of aluminum foil, forming a sling. Grease or coat the pan in nonstick spray. Prepping the pan this way should allow you to remove the bars from the pan easily.

In a small bowl mix the honey, egg, oil, and vanilla. In a large bowl mix oats, brown sugar, wheat germ, cocoa, cinnamon, flour, chocolate chips, nuts, (fruit) and salt. Make an indention in the center of the dry mixture, and pour in the wet mixture and mix well. (Don’t be afraid to use your hands to get everything coated.) Press the mixture into the pan.  Bake for 20 to 30 minutes until the edges are well-set. Cool for about 5 minutes and cut the bars while they are still warm.

*Note: I didn’t have any eggs when I first made this recipe and decided to forge ahead anyway. I gave them a little longer to cook, probably closer to 35 or 40 minutes, but otherwise didn’t change the recipe any. They turned out pretty (as you can see in these pics) and were probably just a little more crumbly than if I had used egg. In other words, these could easily be vegan (depending on whether you consider honey to be non-vegan.)

As you can tell, this is a great recipe for experimenting with, so go ahead and tweak it to your liking. If you do make them, be sure to let me know how they turn out!

Android Central – Part of The Smartphone Experts network, the same folks who run CrackBerry.com, which was one of my favorite Blackberry blogs, and The iPhone Blog. Like several of these blogs, Android Central also runs a store with accessories.

AndroidSPIN – AndroidSPIN appeals to the slightly more technical user, with more coverage of the latest unofficial Android ROMs.

Android and Me - This blog easily wins the Android blog beauty contest, both for its main site and its mobile site. In addition to news, they seem to have a good proportion of original content, such as app reviews and a great tutorial on making your Wordpress blog more iPhone and Android friendly (something I hope to do soon!)

Droid Life – This is definitely the oddball of my list. It’s much less polished than the rest, and focuses exclusively on the Motorola Droid. Despite it being a little less robust than the larger sites, this one has lots of excellent Droid-specific content like the Android 2.1 apps (with multi-touch) that have been ported to the Droid. It can get a bit technical at times, with information on “rooting” and so on, but still a useful site to have in my RSS reader.

I also keep an eye on Android-related posts at Lifehacker (one of my favorite blogs in general) and occasionally browse the Android-tagged posts on Engadget.

Any other Android users out there have favorite blogs (or other Android sites) you frequent? Any you’ve found completely useless? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Last Friday my wife and I received our new Droids, and after using it pretty intensely over the weekend, these are some of my overall impressions. I won’t even attempt at making this post exhaustive – instead I’ll try and post some follow-ups on things like what apps I’ve found useful (or not) and so on.

I must say that I wasn’t initially sold on getting a Droid – the Google Nexus One is supposed to be coming to Verizon sometime this Spring, and knowing that it has more memory, faster processor, a newer version of Android, etc. I was very tempted to just wait. However, just as decision-time was looming reports started to emerge that the Droid would soon be upgraded to the same, newer version of Android (2.1). Also, the Nexus One has definitely had its share of issues for early-adopters, so ultimately I decided to go with the slightly older but seemingly more reliable Droid.

Initial Setup

Setup was relatively painless for me, already having had a Google account. I had sync’d all of my contacts from my old Blackberry to my Google account using Google Sync, and I had already “cleaned up” my address books in anticipation of importing them to the new phone. You may notice I referred to address books. That’s because I’m taking advantage of one of the key features of Android 2.0 or newer, the ability to connect with multiple Google accounts.

I use Gmail for both my personal and work email, calendar, etc. but with separate accounts. Initially, I was worried about how this would go – would I end up with many duplicate contacts because some people appear in both contacts lists? Would I be able to specify where new contacts are saved when I create them on the phone? How would calendars work?

All my fears were laid to rest as I set up the phone, first with my personal account, then adding my work one. Android does a great job of combining duplicate contacts while still allowing you to un-join them if it makes a mistake or if you want them to remain distinct. When you start to add a new contact, it immediately asks which account to create it under.

One slight disappointment is that the calendar only syncs with the primary account on the phone, my personal account in my case. However, since I had already set up calendar sharing between my work and personal accounts I am still able to view, edit, and add to my work calendars. Disaster averted.

Kudos

I’m incredibly impressed with the inherent flexibility of the Android OS. The commercials for the MyTouch 3G (which also uses Android) that tout the system’s myriad personalization options are really spot-on. Within a couple days, I already have a setup that is very usable and customized to my taste. I’ll write more about this when I blog about apps.

The touch screen is great. This is the first touch device I’ve owned and I’ve always been a bit leery, especially of onscreen keyboards. However, the screen is so responsive and the virtual keyboard so good that I find myself rarely using the physical keyboard.

Google Maps and Google Voice integration are awesome. The navigation app is simply game-changing (no wonder Garmin’s stock dropped significantly once Google introduced it!)

Some other highlights:

• Threaded SMS messaging
• Push support for Gmail
• Great call quality
• Very good voice recognition

Gripes

Of course, nothing is perfect, not even shiny new tech-toys. There is always room for improvement, and these are just a few of the things I’ve run into already that leave me wanting more:

Groups support – Gmail itself does a great job of supporting contact groups, allowing you to send messages to groups, arrange contacts, etc. Android’s support of groups is incredibly rudimentary. All you seem to be able to do is filter your contacts by choosing which groups sync from your Gmail accounts and which groups are hidden. Even then, it is a multi-step process that’s more work that it’s worth. I can’t set ringtones based on group membership, I can’t send emails or SMS texts to groups, and I can’t even modify what groups that contacts are members of. This is the biggest FAIL I’ve come across thus far …

Notifications – I’m surprised to say this, but my old Blackberry Curve did a much better job of managing notifications than the Droid. On the Blackberry there was a single menu section for specifying all the many notifications – phone calls, text messages, email accounts, etc. You could set up multiple notification profiles and easily enable them from the home screen. In comparison, the notifications subsystem in Android is much more rudimentary. Within each app, I can control its notifications, and there are some system-wide settings for ringtones and such but no support for multiple profiles. Once notifications are set, all you can do is adjust notification volume, turn off audible alerts (leaving only apps that would normally vibrate), and turn off both audible and vibrating alerts. I’m really disappointed that I can’t set up a more specialized vibration profile, but it seems I may have to find “an app for that” …

Physical Keyboard – One of the bragging rights of this phone is that it has a physical keyboard. However, it sucks. Seriously. I loved the keyboard on my Blackberry. Despite its tiny keys, I could quickly and accurately type what I needed. At first I thought it might just be a learning curve issue, but then I tried the onscreen keyboards (both in portrait and landscape mode) and found them much more usable and accurate. Including a physical keyboard on this device was a significant design decision by Motorola – you would think they would have made it worthwhile! It leaves me wishing they had left it out and saved a couple millimeters in thickness and reduced the mechanical complexity.

Bluetooth Voice Dialing – The last gripe I’ve got (for now) is that Android doesn’t support bluetooth voice dialing. Period. It’s just not there. I’ve done some research and this is simply a feature that isn’t implemented in Android (yet?). This is a huge disappointment for me, because I (did) usemy bluetooth headset for voice dialing all the time. The Droid does have a “Voice Dialing” app, which works very well. You just can’t use it with bluetooth. This seems like such an obvious oversight to me. Even my wife’s old LG enV2 had this feature. My old Motorola e815 that I had 3 years ago had it too. Bluetooth voice dialing pre-dates Android’s existence! Why is it not supported?!?!?! Argh.

Final Thoughts

Don’t take all my gripes to mean I don’t like the Droid – I still love it. It’s just that when a device has so much potential it’s hard not to notice the areas it falls flat on its face. I’m still finding it incredibly useful and overall a much more powerful device than my Blackberry. I still have some things I need to tweak (getting favorite mobile sites bookmarked, etc.) and more apps to play with, but I’m sure that will come with time.

Stay tuned for upcoming posts where I’ll talk more in depth about apps, Google Voice integration, and more!

(Original post available here)

One of the challenges I faced in configuring my new backup system on my Ubuntu Linux-based server was setting up my two external drives to mount at the same place in the filesystem.

Why? Because the program I use to manage my backups, BackupPC, expects the storage “pool” to always be in the same place. My options were to write a script to change the BackupPC configuration each time a different drive was plugged in, or make the pool mount in the same location regardless of which drive I’m using. Because I was working with LUKS-encrypted volumes I faced additional complexities which made it  difficult to use other methods (like volume labeling) because of how Gnome handles and mounts such encrypted volumes.

While it took a while to make it work, once I figured it out it did exactly what I needed. Now, I’m sharing my results with you to save you the trouble of doing all the research yourself!

I found the easiest solution both for this problem and my next one (making eSATA drives auto mount) was to use HAL configuration files. HAL stands for “Hardware Abstraction Layer” and is one of the ways Linux interfaces with various hardware elements, including hard drives. Using XML it is easy to create custom policies to define how HAL handles particular devices.

(*Note: I have read that Ubuntu will soon be moving away from using HAL, possibly as soon as 9.10, Karmic Koala. I’ve tested this on Ubuntu 8.04, 8.10, and 9.04, but it should work with any distro that (still) uses HAL.)

(** Note 2: Having recently begun the process of rebuilding my server on Ubuntu 9.10/Karmic, I can verify that this method DOES NOT WORK. I am currently in the process of figuring out a solution, likely using udev and scripting, and will post my results as a post here …)

These configuration files are located in /etc/hal/fdi/policy. My installation included one existing file – preferences.fdi – which defines whether non-removable drives are auto-mounted. (We’ll get to eSATA auto mounting soon enough …)

Some quick notes on how .fdi files work: first devices are matched with pre-determined keys, defined through XML. Then, actions are taken by changing (or “merging”) other keys. A very basic .fdi file might consist of the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <!-- -*- SGML -*- -->
<deviceinfo version="0.2">

 <device>
   <match key="some.key" string="some_string">
     <merge key="another.key" type="bool">true</merge>
   </match>
 </device>

So what’s the easiest way to find these keys to match and merge? In my experience, Gnome Device Manager (aka gnome-device-manager).

To see if you have Device Manager installed, check under “Applications -> System Tools” or try to launch gnome-device-manager from the terminal. If it doesn’t work, install it using Synaptic or run:

sudo apt-get install gnome-device-manager

With your drive plugged in and turned on, open up the device manager and begin to look for your drive. You may have to expand some of the trees for “SCSI Host Adapters” and “SCSI Devices”, or possibly USB-related trees,  before you see the drive entries, usually titled “Mass Storage Drive” or something about removable storage.  There may be several of these entries. You will need to look at attributes like the model numbers and capacities to determine which drive it is you’re wanting.

Once you’ve identified the drive you want the information for, type ctrl+p or click on “View -> Device Properties” which should make an additional “Properties” tab appear beside the previous “Summary” tab. Now you will be able to see the various keys, types, and values you can use when creating .fdi files. For our purposes here we will need to look at the properties not for the drive itself, but for the volume we want to create a mount point for.

Note: this is with drive attached via eSATA

Our first order of business is to find a key that will provide a definitive match for each drive / volume. In my situation I was using two identical external enclosures with two identical drives. I could have simply created one rule that would specify the mount point based on any drive that matched some shared property, such as the model number (storage.model) but I wanted to make sure that these two volumes and only these volumes would share this mount point. In addition, I wanted to be able to tell at a glance which one was mounted, so I needed HAL to distinguish between them somehow.

Every volume has a distinctive UUID – kind of like a fingerprint that identifies it to the rest of the system. In the device manager, under the properties tab for the volume you’re working on, look for the volume.UUID key. Once you’ve found it you can begin to write your HAL policy file.

Create a new, blank text file in /etc/hal/fdi/policy. (You will probably need to do all this as root / sudo) Name it something like 30-sharedmounts.fdi. (The “30″ in the file name makes sure this policy is evaluated prior to the general preferences file.) Once you have created your file, open it in your favorite text editor and start with the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <!-- -*- SGML -*- -->
<deviceinfo version="0.2">

Now we need to specify the device and they keys we want to match and merge:

<device>
 <match key="block.is_volume" bool="true">
 <match key="volume.uuid" string="7feeefbf-416b-4383-9bb3-7fd51cb3e702">
   <merge key="volume.policy.desired_mount_point" type="string">ext_backup</merge>
   <merge key="volume.label" type="string">Ext Backup 1</merge>
 </match>
 </match>
</device>

Here’s a quick explanation of what you see above, and what each does:

• <match key=”block.is_volume” bool=”true”> – A little bit of insurance, to make sure we’re working with a volume and not a drive.
• <match key=”volume.uuid” string=”7feeefbf-416b-4383-9bb3-7fd51cb3e702″> – As described above, identifies the particular volume you want to specify the mount point for.
• <merge key=”volume.policy.desired_mount_point” type=”string”>ext_backup – This is the new mount point, which will appear beneath /media/ , so this example would mount as /media/ext_backup .
• <merge key=”volume.label” type=”string”>Ext Backup 1 – A little extra nicety. This is how we can identify between different volumes, even when they’re mounted at the same point in the filesystem.

Now that you’ve got the mount point specified for your first volume, you’ll want to do the same for your second (and any other subsequent) volumes. For each volume, just find the UUID and create a new <device> section in the .fdi file. Be sure to specify the same mount point and unique volume labels (if you so desire.) Once you’re done, save your file and restart HAL (or just reboot.)

sudo /etc/init.d/hal restart

Now, whenever you plug in your drives and Gnome auto-mounts your volumes, they will mount in the same place every time.

What’s that, you say? You’re using eSATA drives and they don’t auto-mount? My next blog post will take care of that for you, and it shouldn’t take more than about 5 minutes of your time. As an added bonus, this method will mount the volumes in the same place regardless of whether they’re connected by USB or eSATA.

After obtaining (and assembling) my new backup hardware my first order of business was to get the external hard drives formatted and set up with drive encryption. Since I’m swapping out one drive to store off-site I wanted to use drive encryption just in case it somehow ended up in someone else’s posession. In Ubuntu, the easiest way to encrypt a whole drive is using LUKS. I chose LUKS because it is easily readable by most Linux computers and can even be set up on a Windows PC, if absolutely necessary. This post will walk through the (remarkably simple) process of setting up encryption and formatting.

(Note: most of these instructions are condensed adaptations of articles I found here and here. )

FYI: I set up my drives using these instructions on Ubuntu 8.10 – Intrepid Ibex. I was later able to successfully mount and access the drives using Ubuntu 8.04 – Hardy Heron on my server and 9.04 – Jaunty Jackalope on my laptop.

When setting up my drives I was using USB 2.0, therefore these directions reflect that. The process may have been faster using eSATA, but at the time I did not yet have a controller card. The directions should be applicable to eSATA as well (unless otherwise noted), but your mileage may vary. These instructions can also be easily adapted for creating a handy, encrypted USB “thumb” drive.

Necessary Software

In order to proceed you must have the cryptsetup package installed:

sudo apt-get install cryptsetup

Finding the drive

After powering on the drive and hooking it up to the computer you need to identify the device:

dmesg | tail -20

[33884.688746] usb 4-1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd ...
[33884.764079] usb 4-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[33884.764868] scsi8 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
[33884.765316] usb-storage: device found at 9
[33884.765321] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scan...
[33888.042416] usb-storage: device scan complete
[33888.043707] scsi 8:0:0:0: Direct-Access     HDS72505 0KLA360 ...
[33888.047550] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] 976773168 512-byte hardware sectors
[33888.048292] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[33888.048300] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 38 00 00
[33888.048305] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[33888.049648] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] 976773168 512-byte hardware sectors
[33888.050421] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[33888.050428] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 38 00 00
[33888.050432] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[33888.050438]  sdb: unknown partition table
[33888.066470] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk
[33888.066545] sd 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0

In the example above (from this article)  you can see that the drive has been recognized as /dev/sdb. Your drives may show up differently (mine appeared as /dev/sdd and /dev/sde.) I’ll continue to use /dev/sdb to refer to the drive we are working with, but you should replace it with whatever your result is.

Create the partition

Before you can actually set up encryption or format the drive, you must create a partition. This is simply a portion of the drive you intend to store data on. A single physical drive may contain multiple partitions (as is usually the case with a linux boot drive) or just one. At this point you could easily choose to set up both an encrypted and a non-encrypted partition on your drive. I didn’t have a need for this, so I’ll be continuing with a single partition.

While it can be accomplished via the command line, I chose to use the graphical GParted program, available under the “System -> Administration -> Partition Editor” menu.

Choose your device via the drop-down menu in the upper right-hand corner. Then, select the unallocated space and create a new partition that encompasses the entire available space. We do not want to format the partition, only create it, so select “unformatted” as the filesystem.

Click “Apply” and your new partition will be created. You should now have a partition named something like /dev/sdb1 (notice there’s now a number added.) Once you have created the partition successfully, close GParted.

Setting up encryption

The next section is copied verbatim from the aforementioned article:

The dm-crypt, sha256 and aes kernel modules will need to be loaded prior to encrypting the partition:

sudo modprobe dm-crypt
sudo modprobe sha256
sudo modprobe aes

If the following error messages appear when loading sha256 and aes:

sudo modprobe sha256
WARNING: Error inserting padlock_sha ... No such device

sudo modprobe aes
WARNING: Error inserting padlock_aes ... No such device

it is an indication that the system does not have a hardware cryptographic device (source: Ubuntu Bug #206129)

The workaround is to add the following lines (using your favorite editor) to the bottom of /etc/modprobe.d/aliases and re-run the modprobe commands for the sha256 and aes kernel modules:

alias sha256 sha256_generic
alias aes aes_generic

Note that this is only necessary when we are setting up the drive. Later we will access them through Gnome and won’t need these modules.

Encrypting the partition

Finally, we can run the command to encrypt the /dev/sdb1 partition.

While there are other ways of securing your encrypted drive (such as key file stored locally or on a USB flash drive) I have chosen to use a strong passphrase. Mine is 23 characters long, but any password 12 characters or longer not consisting of dictionary-findable words should suffice.

The tutorial I used recommended the following command:

sudo cryptsetup --verify-passphrase luksFormat /dev/sdb1 -c aes -s 256 -h sha256

The LUKS-formatting command above has the following options:

• –verify-passphrase – ensures the passphrase is entered twice to avoid an incorrect passphrase being used
• -c aes – specifies the use of AES encryption (c for cipher)
• -s 256 – specifies a 256-bit key size
• -h sha256 – use 256-bit SHA for password hashing

However, after reading this article I decided to go with 128-bit AES encryption instead, along with a strong passphrase, in hopes of reducing some computational overhead. Therefore, my command instead looked something like:

sudo cryptsetup --verify-passphrase luksFormat /dev/sdb1 -c aes -s 128 -h sha256

Creating the filesystem

After setting up the encrypted partition, you must open and map it in order to set up the filesystem and begin using it.

Start with:

sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb1 secureUSB

Which should prompt you for your passphrase and map the drive to /dev/mapper/secureUSB. Now you can format the encrypted partition with a filesystem using whatever method you prefer. I had good luck using GParted to format in ext3.

Like before, select the device you want to create the filesystem on – in this case /dev/mapper/secureUSB. You should again see a block of unallocated space, which you should select and create a new partition within. You may be presented with a big, scary message about setting a disklabel – tell it to create (since you have no data to lose on the drive at this point anyway!)

The create new partition screen will look just the same as before, only this time you will want to specify the filesystem type you want to use. Apply all the pending operations and wait for the formatting process – it can take quite a while, especially for large drives.

Mounting the encrypted drive

Having successfully set up encryption and created a filesystem, we’re almost ready to to mount the drive and begin using it! (Of course, this is still assuming you’re using USB. If you’re using eSATA then this won’t work as easily – that will come in a later post!)

Shut down the computer, disconnect the drive, and reboot. Once you’re back up and logged in, reconnect the drive and Gnome should prompt you for the passphrase and then mount automatically.

If you want the drive to unlock automatically on this computer, select “remember forever.”

After you’re unlocked and mounted, the final step is to take ownership of the drive’s root folder with a user other than your sudo/root user:

sudo chown youruser:youruser /media/disk

where youruser is the user you want to have ownership and /media/disk is where gnome auto-mounted the drive.

Finished!

Whew! I must say it has taken far longer to write this post than it did to actually perform these operations. The longest part of the entire process was creating the ext3 filesystem. If you’re using eSATA to set up the drive it will go much faster, however as I mentioned you will have a few more steps to take before you can easily hot-swap your drive. Stay tuned for the next post in this series for that how-to …

But even with making soup nearly every Monday and often eating the leftovers for lunch throughout the week, sometimes there are other not-so-simple (or not so vegetarian/vegan) soups we like to eat. White Chicken “Chili” is one of those favorites. While I haven’t deviated much from the recipe I started with, over the years I have tweaked this dish to where we really like it a lot.

This recipe originated in a church cookbook from the Central Church of the Brethren (Roanoke, VA), published in 1993. It is credited to then-pastor David Yingling. I find it somewhat ironic that this recipe will have now been tweaked and shared by two different Brethren pastors! Even though it’s called chili it’s really more of a cheesy soup. However, the flavors are decidedly chili-like, so I’ll stick with the original nomenclature. Here’s my rendition of “White Chicken Chili”:

White Chicken Chili

Ingredients

5 Tbsp butter
1 medium 0nion, chopped
1 medium bell pepper, chopped
2-4 jalapeño peppers (to taste), chopped small
1 tsp kosher salt
1/2 tsp powdered ginger
1/2 tsp chipotle pepper powder (or cayenne, more or less to taste)
1 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp dried sage OR 4-5 fresh sage leaves, pulverized fine
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 large boneless, skinless chicken breast, cubed
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup half and half or milk (works fine with either)
2 cups chicken broth or stock
1 (17 oz.) can Northern beans
8 oz block Monterey Jack cheese, shredded
~1 cup corn (fresh, frozen, or canned – by order of preference)

Optional garnishes:
Chopped fresh tomato
Sliced scallions / green onions
Fried sage leaves
Hot sauce (we like Frank’s Red Hot)

Instructions

1. Melt 2 tablespoons of butter in a heavy-bottomed pot or saucepan (5 qt. minimum.) After butter has finished foaming, add onions, peppers, ginger, salt, and cumin. Sauté over medium heat until onions are translucent and a good fond is beginning to develop in the pan. Add the sage and stir to combine.
2. Move vegetables to the outer edges of the pot, clearing a space in the center. Add chicken, evenly distributed over the open area in the center. Allow to cook for 2-3 minutes before turning the chicken pieces over. After another 2-3 minutes, stir vegetables and chicken to combine. (The chicken should be nearly cooked through.) Add the garlic, stir, and cook until garlic is fragrant – about 30 seconds. Remove the chicken / vegetable mixture from the pan.
3. There should be some fond left in the pan at this point – that is a good thing, don’t clean it out! Melt the remaining 3 tablespoons of butter in the pan over medium-low heat until foaming subsides. Add the flour and whisk until smooth. Allow this roux to cook for 1-2 minutes, stirring constantly and taking care not to let it darken beyond a golden brown.
4. While whisking, add milk or half and half. Continue to whisk over heat until smooth and combined, 30 seconds to 1 minute.  Return heat to medium and begin to add chicken broth in several increments, whisking to combine and waiting for the mixture to bubble after each addition.
5. Once all ingredients are well-blended, add the chicken & vegetable mixture back to the pot. Add the beans (and any liquid from the can) and the shredded cheese and stir until cheese has melted.
6. Cover and continue simmering over medium-low heat for about 20 minutes to allow the flavors to meld, stirring occasionally. Add corn and cook 2-3 more minutes (longer if using frozen) until corn is just cooked.
7. Serve while warm, topping with garnishes if desired.

As you might imagine, this is quite rich with all that butter and cheese. This recipe will make about 6 small bowls or 4 large bowls. Even for me one bowl is usually sufficient! It goes great with fresh cornbread.

Let me know if you have any questions or if you decide to give this a try! I’d love to know how it turns out and what you think.

Before I get to what my new backup hardware consists of, it might be helpful to know a bit about my existing (old) setup. My home network consists of a workstation, a laptop, a netbook, a seldom-used garage PC, and a multipurpose server. Among it’s many duties, the server is a centralized backup server, allowing the various computers to back up files each night. It runs on an old AMD Athlon motherboard with 512MB RAM, using a 30 GB drive for the OS and programs and a pair of 200 GB drives for storage and backup.

Prior to this upgrade, the backup drive was regularly at 95% capacity. Even with the intelligent pooling technology used by the BackupPC software it had become necessary to limit the number of nightly backups I was keeping in order to make space for the unique data from the various PCs.  So I decided it was time to upgrade my storage situation.

I had been debating for a while how to best increase my storage space while also ensuring the integrity and protection of my data. Having recently witnessed my parents’ misfortune and recognizing that if a similar tragedy would have happened to me that many priceless digital memories and large amounts of work-related data would have been lost, I knew it was time for a system that incorporated some kind of off-site backup.

One option I contemplated was an online backup service, where your data is stored in the “cloud” and available whenever and wherever you need to access it. The particular provider I considered was SpiderOak. I had one of their free 2 GB accounts already and I was very impressed with their security and privacy policies as well as their interoperability with Linux. However, the problem with such online backup options is their monthly fees. For the price of 100 GB per year at SpiderOak I could buy a hard drive ten times that size!

So that’s what I did – I bought two 1TB hard drives. This will allow for one hard drive to be in service and the other stored at a secure, off-site location in case of disaster. I’ll have tons of storage space and no monthly fees. A win-win situation.

Of course, juggling two different drives means additional complications with set-up and management, but those are later blog posts.

My original plan was to buy two bare drives and two USB enclosures. My server does not support serial ATA (SATA) drives, so USB seemed easiest for both compatibility and swap-ability. I’ll elaborate later, but to make a long story short USB simply was not adequate for my particular needs, so I ended up purchasing a PCI SATA controller as well. Thankfully the enclosures supported both USB and eSATA, so everything else was simply a matter of configuration (also another post.)

So finally, here’s the hardware I ended up using to make my backup plans a reality. All links are to Newegg, my personal favorite purveyor of computer parts. (The prices listed were as of July 2009, and I’m sure will probably become laughable as time passes.)

• 2 Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EADS  1TB SATA drives – $79.99 ea.
• 2 Vantec NST-300SU external USB / eSATA enclosures – $27.98 ea.
• Rosewill RC-210 PCI internal & external SATA controller – $19.99

Total cost – $235.93 (All the items qualified for free shipping at the time I ordered them.) Less than the cost of 100GB for two years through an online backup provider.

Thus far I’ve had no hardware-related problems, and everything has been superbly compatible with Linux (Ubuntu 8.04 LTS / Hardy Heron.) The drives are extraordinarily quiet. Since the server still has 3 internal hard drives and several fans, the new external drives are basically inaudible.

The only nitpick I’ve got is with the Vantec enclosures. There is a bright blue power / activity LED on the front the enclosure, and when you install the drive into the internal tray you have to plug the LED in as you put the enclosure back together. Two small, recessed screws hold the drive tray in place. I found (with both my enclosures) that if I tightened the screws all the way down, completely closing the gap between the tray and the rest of the enclosure, the lights would not work. If I backed the screws out just a few threads everything worked fine. I don’t think the gap is large enough to pose a concern, so it’s basically just a small aesthetic annoyance. Not a deal-breaker, but something worth noting.

That’s it for the hardware specs! Next up, formatting the removable drives and setting them up with LUKS encryption.

Over the next couple days (weeks?) you can expect more on the following topics:

• New backup hardware: drives, enclosures, and controller card
• Setting things up: LUKS encryption on external drives
• Specifying a shared mount point in Ubuntu Linux
• Switching from USB to eSATA, making eSATA automount
• Making external encrypted drives work with BackupPC

As you can tell from this list I faced a lot of hoops to jump through in order to get this up and running. I’ll add links to the individual posts as I write them. Feel free to ask questions if you’ve got any!

Messenger Bag Contents

Inspired by a post on The Simple Dollar, I thought it would be fun to spill the contents of my trusty messenger bag for all the world to see.

As you may know, I commute by bicycle whenever the weather and my schedule permit, and sometimes even when they don’t! Since I work many places other than my office (home, coffee shops, local parks, etc.) I tend to keep most of what I need to work with me in my bag, since you never know what you might need when. I must admit, the eclectic mix of contents surprised even me. Read on to see what’s inside:

As you can see in the picture above (click for hi-res), I can cram quite a bit into my Dana Designs Ti messenger bag. I got the bag on ebay four or five years ago and even though I’ve thought of replacing it recently, as it’s starting to show some wear and tear, I simply can’t find anything else I like as much as this one!

Now for the grand list: (starting bottom center and moving counter-clockwise)

• Toshiba Laptop w/ extended-life battery
• Laptop power adapter
• Audio cables – mini-DIN to mini-DIN and mini-DIN to RCA (useful for connecting the laptop to other audio systems)
• Note pad – for those times when I’m feeling a little “analog”
• Blackberry Curve 8330 – don’t leave home without it!
• Plantronics bluetooth headset
• Bluetooth GPS receiver
• Reading materials – I’ve always got an assortment of books, magazines, etc. in my bag. Pictured are The Green Bible, Tim Keller’s The Reason for God, the latest Christian Century, and some premarital counseling materials
• Garage door opener
• Bike Richmond map – in case I meet anyone who needs a copy
• Assortment of writing devices: 2 pens, a pencil, and a couple mini sharpies
• Anointing oil
• Spare 1GB microSD card with miniSD and full-size adapters
• 6′ low-profile ethernet cable
• Stapler
• SwissBit – Swiss army knife / 512MB USB drive
• Chap stick
• Band-aids
• Inexpensive Koss earbuds – the cat ate my good ones …
• Rubber bands
• $1.01 in pocket change – I don’t always keep this exact amount but I always have some stashed just in case
• Spare Blackberry battery
• Business cards – they make good bookmarks too
• Microfiber cleaning cloth
• LED flash light
• Paper clips
• Mini USB cable – for the Blackberry, GPS, and anything else that might need it!

Just for the record, all of this is in my bag intentionally, not just because I put it in there one day and have never taken it out. And yes, I was an Eagle Scout (be prepared!) It’s amazing how often I find myself making use of some of these things, even the more unusual ones.

The bag, packed with all of the goodies pictured, weighs exactly 15 pounds. While it may seem like a lot all listed out like this, note that many of these things weigh just a few ounces each. Also note what’s not here: scads of papers, crumpled up receipts, and so on. I make it a point to file such things quickly (or eliminate them entirely) so I don’t have to worry about lugging them around.

Keeping the contents of my bag streamlined allows for plenty of extra room to add things like a light jacket or lunch and snacks when I’m heading out on the bike.

So there you have it: the mystery of my messenger bag, exposed.